Psychoanalysis, society, and politics

It should come as no surprise to our readers that we dedicate this issue of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis to the ways in which the field of psychological research founded by Sigmund Freud can help us understand and deal with social and political problems, now that the war in the Ukraine has been going on for more than three months. One of us (M.C.) owes to the book by Andreas Kappeler Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine (Kappeler, 2022) the welcome and necessary knowledge of the complexity of the history and the development of the national identity of the Ukrainian people, a process which has been going on for several centuries, and which reminded him of the similar long process undergone by his own country, Italy. Although Italy had already started having a national literature in the thirteenth century, it was only in 1861 that it became a politically unified country. This happened with the Ukraine only in the summer of 1991, but given its position on the border between the European Union and Russia, as well as the lack of an adequate capacity of dialogue with and containment of Vladimir Putin’s aggressive strategy and plans, we are now confronted with the most terrible war we have had in Europe since the end of World War II. And there is no way yet in sight for how such a war can come to the end.

“Psychoanalysis and political economy” by Siegfried Zepf and Dietmar Seel (both from Saarbrücken, Germany) is the first article of this issue. We propose it to our readers also in order to remind them of how much its first author – who passed away in October 2021 aged 84 – was genuinely committed to a socially critical psychoanalysis. No wonder that his 2009 article “Consumerism and identity: Some psychoanalytical considerations” has received 2760 views and occupies second position on this journal’s list of Most Read Articles (see Zepf, 2009). One of us (M.C.) originally met Siegfried Zepf in 1990 through the German “Bernfeld-Gruppe,” a group of colleagues committed to developing a critique of “institutionalized psychoanalysis,” as the editor of the book “Wer sich nicht bewegt, der spürt auch seine Fesseln nicht” – Anmerkungen zur gegenwärtigen Lage der Psychoanalyse (Zepf, 1990). It is no wonder that, in the article written together with his colleague and friend Dietmar Seel, Siegfried Zepf focussed on the way in which psychoanalysis can be dealt with from a Marxist point of view, with particular regard for the way in which we have our patients pay us for the work we do with them, and not for the result we are able to obtain – that is, irrespective of whether or not we cure them. The authors’ analysis brings them to conclude that, in psychoanalysis, the suspension of truth value, the tolerance shown towards contradictory concepts, the lack of conceptual criticism, and the exclusion of sociocritical issues seem to be effects of psychoanalysts’ interest in realizing the exchange value of their psychoanalytic treatment and their accompanying lesser interest in its use value.

From Germany comes also the following original clinical contribution, the article “Unresolved shadows: German encounters in the consulting room” by our Berlin colleague Stefanie Sedlacek, a training analyst of the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG) whose article “Avatar of desire? – Virtual space of possibility in video and telephone analysis” has just been published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. As the DPG was one of the four founding societies of the IFPS in 1962 (see Huppke, 2021), our journal has dedicated much space to the reconstruction of the development of psychoanalysis in Germany since World War II. No. 1/2021 was the fourth of a series of monographic issues on “German themes in psychoanalysis” edited by one of us (M.C.; see Conci, 2021). With her paper Stefanie Sedlacek adds a very important clinical dimension to the ground covered in the four issues. Through it we learn that, although the reunification of West and East Germany dates back to October 1990, her patients seem to be still living in a divided country, this giving rise to an internalized split identity, whose defensive use in the transference has to be continually worked through in analytic work. Such a “split German object” is impersonal and nonempathic, and antagonizes the idea of an independent and personalized internal world.

By initiating us in what one can call the collective character traits of a community, “Unresolved shadows” implicitly puts forward a group perspective in its historical dimension, as a potential factor in understanding individual dynamics. The group perspective may moreover be indispensable in the psychoanalytic understanding of traumatic social phenomena, especially when they present themselves repetitively in the historical course of a given society. Aspects of this approach were exposed by one of us (G.M.) in the Editorial accompanying a recent issue of this journal (Maniadakis, 2019).

In this issue, Hana Salaam Abdel-Malek, author of “Hezbollah: Lebanon’s identified patient,” attempts to approach facets of Lebanon’s sociopolitical life from a group and family psychoanalytic perspective. She asks whether Hezbollah – one of Lebanon’s children – may be considered not only as a “symptom” of its large family, nation-state “incestual” dynamics, but also as a “scapegoat/Messiah” who carries both the family’s incestual dynamics and internal tensions and its hope for a solid and cohesive nation-state identity. The author – a psychoanalyst living in Beirut who trained with the Paris Psychoanalytic Society – believes that a group psychoanalytic approach could help societies give up defenses such as these that are “pathological ideological positions.”

In his article “Humiliation, shame, and violence: Honor, trauma and political extremism before and after the 2009 crisis in Greece,” Roman Gerodimos attempts to explain aspects of violence in the post-2009 Greek social/political/public domain by combining cultural anthropology, political sociology, and psychoanalysis according to Gilligan’s shame/violence theory. To the author – a Greek political scientist based at Bournemouth University in the UK – Gilligan’s theory provides “a compelling interpretation” of the civic culture in the social group of contemporary Greece, “throwing light on outbreaks of political extremism.”

The social dimension of our work is also a central ingredient of the following article, “Superivisees’ professional development and the analytic community,” by Hanoch Yerushalmi from the University of Haifa, Israel. An expert supervisor, the author shows us how the experience of supervision might provide supervisees with new group-object experiences and change their defensively organized rigid familial configurations, thereby further integrating their professional selves as well as strengthening the analytic community.

Two book reviews accompany the first issue of Volume 31 of our journal. Andrea Castiello d’Antonio (Rome) reviews the book History of countertransference by Alberto Stefana, a brilliant Italian psychologist and researcher presently working at Duke University in North Carolina, USA, with whom Robert Hinshelwood recently wrote an article on the countertransference in the work of Racker and Heimann (see Stefana, Hinshelwood, & Borensztejn, 2021). A concept that was introduced by Freud in 1910, it is now at the center of contemporary psychoanalysis, and it was an excellent idea to write a book on its “conceptual evolution and career” in our field.

In the second book review, Grigoris Maniadakis strongly recommends that we read Franco Borgogno’s latest book One life heals another: Beginnings, maturity, outcomes of a vocation. In this, one of Italy’s most prominent psychoanalysts – a recipient of the Sigourney Award and one of the founders of the International Sándor Ferenczi Network– talks freely about his life and work, in both a very instructive and a very engaging way. Franco Borgogno’s 2012 book The girl who committed hara-kiri and other clinical and historical essays was reviewed in this journal by Marco Conci in 2013, and in it the reader can find a detailed reconstruction of Borgogno’s professional and scientific career (Conci, 2013).